Lobish: Symbolic Language for Interpreting Electroencephalogram Signals in Language Detection Using Channel-Based Transformation and Pattern

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals contain information about the brain’s state as they reflect the brain’s functioning. However, the manual interpretation of EEG signals is tedious and time-consuming. Therefore, automatic EEG translation models need to be proposed using machine learning methods. In this study, we proposed an innovative method to achieve high classification performance with explainable results. We introduce channel-based transformation, a channel pattern (ChannelPat), the t algorithm, and Lobish (a symbolic language). By using channel-based transformation, EEG signals were encoded using the index of the channels. The proposed ChannelPat feature extractor encoded the transition between two channels and served as a histogram-based feature extractor. An iterative neighborhood component analysis (INCA) feature selector was employed to select the most informative features, and the selected features were fed into a new ensemble k-nearest neighbor (tkNN) classifier. To evaluate the classification capability of the proposed channel-based EEG language detection model, a new EEG language dataset comprising Arabic and Turkish was collected. Additionally, Lobish was introduced to obtain explainable outcomes from the proposed EEG language detection model. The proposed channel-based feature engineering model was applied to the collected EEG language dataset, achieving a classification accuracy of 98.59%. Lobish extracted meaningful information from the cortex of the brain for language detection.